The brief
A 1.1 mn sq ft commercial development where every stage of the construction lifecycle had to be on a single record — from the first excavation log through tenant handover. The owner wanted billing aligned to site progress, deviations flagged before they compounded, and one dashboard for the project team.
Why it was risky
Multi-year commercial builds usually accumulate parallel records — site diaries, contractor billing logs, progress photos, BIM drift, separate drone footage. The operational consequence is payment disputes, duplicated reporting effort, and slow decisions.
- Lifecycle digitisation: there was no unified digital record across the construction lifecycle.
- Quantity visibility: progress, execution-level deviations and as-built BOQ were locked in different systems.
- Billing misalignment between contractor invoicing and site progress was the largest source of disputes.
- Monitoring fragmentation kept the project team toggling between tools.
What Observance did
- Excavation tracking captured quantities from the earliest construction stage so cut-and-fill records were on the same dataset as everything that followed.
- Continuous as-built models updated 3D models and 2D drawings throughout execution.
- BOQ and billing verification generated as-built BOQ from the scans and cross-checked it against contractor billing — payment accuracy moved from manual to automatic.
- Deviation analysis ran an as-built-vs-planned comparison continuously, flagging execution drift before it compounded.
- Live monitoring added live stream and timelapse cameras for real-time site visibility.
- Drone and walkthroughs delivered comprehensive, navigable site coverage on a continuous cadence.
Outcome
The integrated workflow was established across the full project. Billing transparency improved, real-time decisions were possible against a single record, and manual reporting effort was materially reduced.
